Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Position is a one-night group exhibition featuring works by Skip Arnold, Brian Doan, Tricia Lawless Murray, Clifford Owens, and Johanna Reed.

These warped self-portraits range from sexual to political, and are perversely nostalgic. The extreme chaos of Arnold’s “Head Shaking”, the inevitable melting of Doan’s ice “Self-Portrait (being Ho)”, the seductive and contemplative imagery of Lawless Murray’s “I AM THE SUN”, the visceral memory of Owens’ “Belt Piece”, and the poignant, yet illusive happenings of Reed’s “Criticality” all mystify the real as they individually and collectively perform Position.

(front gallery wall)

Brian Doan

Self-Portrait (being Ho)

10"x16"x6"

ice

(gallery from
left to right)

Clifford Owens

Belt Piece

2004

mini DV, edited and desaturated

Tricia Lawless Murray

I AM THE SUN

2012

12"H x 12"W x 5"D with
audio 3:58 minutes

archival pigment print, spray paint,
33.3 rpm record, wood

Johanna Reed

My New Criticality and Other Stories from the Contemporary
Art World

Book of stories, 10 pages, 4.25"
x 5.5", edition of 20

Skip Arnold

Head Shaking 2

2009

16mm color film
transferred to DVD

For 24 years Skip Arnold has maintained a transgresssive practice of
performance, film and installation art. His work finds its foundations in the
historical canons of performance that address and dissect the body politic –
confronting the body as politicized, enculturated, but also addressing the body
through the lens of humanitarian and ontological inquiries pertaining to
strength, endurance, existence, and presence. Skip Arnold is uncompromising in
his work – he does not follow current trends, nor does he get stuck doing the
same performances over and over. While he retains certain themes or courses of
inquiry (the body, narcissism, the cinematic, dissection of a cultural / or
social existence), his work has evolved considerably, especially with his
recent sojourn in France.

Brian Doan
is an artist and photographer based in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited
internationally, including the Museum of Photography in Riverside, California,
the International Center of Photography in New York, the Centro de la Imagen in
Mexico City, Mexico, the Victoria & Albert Museums in London, the Amsterdam
Tropenmuseum, and the Milan Triennale. He is the recipient of several grants
and awards, including from the California Council for the Humanities, the
Rockefeller Fellows in the Humanities, and the Fulbright-Hays.

Tricia Lawless Murray
was born and raised along the coast in Southern California but completed both
her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Northern California. At UC Berkeley
she studied Art History through the lens of class, gender and race and at
California College of the Arts she studied photography and video embracing the performative
aspects of feminist self-representation. Her work has been exhibited
internationally and nationally, most recently at Hasted Kraeutler in NYC and
Jancar Gallery in LA where she is represented. In the past year her work was featured
in LA Weekly, La Lettre de la Photographie, Conveyor, Kroutchev Planet Photo,
American Suburb X, Fraction and other publications. Her work is in the
collections of the Allan Kaprow Estate and the Getty Research Institute and it
has been published in the Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography, Volume II.
In the fall her work will be included in the Gomma book titled MONO. She will
have a solo show at Jancar Gallery that opens in October. She currently lives
and works in Los Angeles.

Clifford Owens’ art has appeared in numerous group
and solo exhibitions in the United States of America and abroad. He studied at
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mason Gross School of Visual Arts
Rutgers University, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He was an
artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem and he attended the
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Clifford has received many grants
and fellowships including Art Matters, Louis Tiffany Comfort Award, New York
Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, New York Community Trust, Lambent
Foundation, and the Rutgers University Ralph Bunche Distinguished Graduate
Fellowship. Publications and reviews include New York Times, Art+Auction, Village Voice, Art in America,
The New Yorker, Greater New York
2005, Performa: New Visual Art Performance, and Rethinking
Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education.He has lectured widely about his work, and has held visiting
artist faculty positions at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. In 2009, Clifford was
Hanes Visiting Artist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His
project Anthology was the subject of
a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 and will also be the subject of his forthcoming
book Anthology. Clifford was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1971, and he
currently lives and works in Queens, New York where he raises his young sons Inti
and Joaquin.

A born lever-puller, Johanna Reed's got money to blow.
Before graduating from UCLA with a degree in design, she studied astrophysics
for three years, and before that fronted the junk-punk band Buttcheek Doofus
(with her father on bass). Between that and her current pursuit of an MFA in Art
from CalArts, she's worked as an opera set designer's archivist, a phone sex
operator, film critic, underwear slogan writer, and environmental engineer. As
an artist, she's a writer, who makes work with and in front of live people, and
the only physical objects she allows herself to produce are books. Her work has
been performed at the Hammer Museum, Perform NOW!, Machine Project, POST, and
Anatomy Riot in Los Angeles; Southern Exposure in San Francisco; and Prinzessinnen
Studio and the basement of Jahnstrasse 6 in Berlin. Her writing has been
published in Pank Magazine, InDigest, and in three limited edition books for
WHL Studio. Her latest play was Motherload, a 30-hour durational performance
based on Hecuba, the ancient Greek tragedy by Euripedes. The only untrue part
of this bio is the second clause of the first sentence.

Ali Kheradyar
is a Los Angeles based artist. She attended New York University and received a
Bachelor of Arts in Individualized Study, concentrating in dance, music, and
performance. Her cross-disciplinary interests include photography, performance
art, dance, and writing. She received her Master's in Performance Studies from
NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in May 2011.Kheradyar's work has been shown at Third Streaming, NY,
Western Project, CA, Torrance Art Museum, CA, PØST Los Angeles, and Project
Space Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany.She is represented by Western Project in Culver City.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Transformation Through Natureis a one night exhibition, comprised of paintings by Lauren Dees. This series is an exploration of
changes that arise by the agency of nature and also by passage into and out of
nature. Graphite drawings depict
various carcasses that have been abandoned forcefully and intuitively. Through and through a colorful,
geometric force weaves its way in and around. With each deviation from the surface these watercolor forms
surge forward, drawing a new story from the old.